What a strange blog this is. Or perhaps what a strange day I’m having today. For each day carries its own colours, moods, feelings and impressions. I’m grateful for this, for often a day can be quietly unbearable, and I long for the pall of night to cloak me so that I can start again, refreshed, renewed, by sleep…

the innocent sleep,Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,Chief nourisher in life’s feast—

And thence to think on the next entry in this wandering musical through my half-forgotten life. Many is the day when I start to write a piece and realise that I am not one, but two or three years out with my memory. Or, perhaps worse, I can remember a snapshot, a few colours and no more. No details, no essence. I know I saw Prince at Wembley Arena in the late 80s. I had to email a half-dozen likely contenders and ask them if they were with me “that night” and on the 6th attempt I got a YES, from Lewis MacLeod, who even remembered the hat I was wearing. So – hey – drop me a line if you accompanied me to any of these gigs !! :

The Who – Rainbow

Parliament/Funkadelic – Hammersmith Odeon

Black Uhuru – Rainbow

Aswad – anywhere (saw them loads)

The Specials – Hammersmith Palais

Madness – also Hammersmith Palais I think

The B52s – probably supporting :

Talking Heads – at Hammersmith Palais

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – Hammersmith Odeon

Elton John – Wembley Arena

This is just a small selection of the puzzle, strewn across the floor of my mind, incomplete, disappearing. One of the main reasons I’m writing the blog is so that I can get some of it down before it all disappears. Not because I think it’s important, but because it actually happened, and other people are involved. Sadly I can’t remember who they are half the time. Does it matter ? Maybe not. Best not to spend too much time thinking about the past, or planning the future. I know. But sometimes the present is just too dull to be indulged, and at these points I sit down and write, dig it all up, try and recall a moment, a feeling, a turning point, a reveal. Just to pin some of it down.

It’s either missing a part, or it’s endless. This is number 138 and I can’t see me finishing anytime before 500, using the template I’ve now established. That’s kind of ridiculous. So now, like Rakim (see My Pop Life #86)

When I’m writing I’m trapped inbetween the lines, I escape when I finish the rhyme

But. One of the delights of the process is the email traffic between me and people I haven’t spoken to for ages about a specific time. Or people I do speak to regularly trying to help with memory holes. This part is fun. I don’t think I suddenly remember stuff though. It’s either there or it isn’t. My friend Simon K has a brilliant memory and has tapped it regularly for his novels and short stories. He has the ability to open a wormhole in his mind and follow the traces back back way back to a day, an afternoon, a movement of someone’s arm. It is uncanny and very affecting. He claims to have trained himself to do this just using concentration. This may well be true, but I don’t have that kind of mind. I’m a butterfly-type person, born under the twins, restless, flighty, settling for brief periods before taking off again. I’ve always been like that. So many of the memories are these brief glimpses, flickering shadows, inchoate, yearning. It’s the best I can do.

Memories may be beautiful and yet

what’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget

Thinking about these things this song felt perfect. I think I discovered it with Lewis MacLeod in those late 1970s when we went on a self-imposed pilgrimage of discovery into the music called soul. We found a book called, yes, The Soul Book, which outlined the various centres of excellence – Detroit and Motown, Philadelphia and the Philly label, Memphis and Stax, Hi Records and others, the Atlantic label in New York which reached out to embrace the whole community, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and many others. This book no longer appears to exist, even on Google, but I have it in a box in the attic in another country. Oh yes.

And at the back of the book the contributors – there were about ten of them – had listed their ten favourite soul records. This was terrifically useful for two 20-year old chaps as a kind of road map. Some songs – these would be solid-gold certainties – appeared on two lists. Kind of a guarantee of excellence we thought. You could tell the ones who wanted to list ten obscure songs that no one else had chosen or perhaps even heard, and we worked our way through these lists by searching the shops of Soho and Camden Town. Lee Dorsey, Millie Jackson, Lorraine Ellison, Garnet Mimms, The Delfonics, Betty Wright, and yes Gladys Knight and others all endorsed in print. This is how you did things pre-internet by the way. Research. Expeditions. Treasure.

Gladys Knight has already appeared in this blog (My Pop Life #29) as a Motown artist in the 1960s, then she moved to Buddah Records for Midnight Train To Georgia and You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me…and I’m wondering if this song was on that famous lost memory mixtape too. It never fails to make me cry when I hear this line –

Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line ?

The song was the theme from a massive hit movie The Way We Were, starring Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in 1974, perhaps the biggest song of 1974, sung by Streisand herself.

Written by Marvin Hamlisch (music) and Alan & Marilyn Bergman (words) it is quite simply one of those extraordinary pieces of work that touches me very deeply, and though Barbra Streisand sings it beautifully, magnificently, I’m afraid Gladys absolutely lifts it into eternity. As Gladys Knight explains below in the 2009 live version, (a concert Jenny and I were lucky enough to attend) – she never wanted to record it in the studio, but she would sing it every night with “Try To Remember”as a little spoken entrée. Her management recorded it live one night then presented it to her afterwards, and now we all have it. It’s one of the most treasured records in my collection.

and if we had the chance to do it all again, tell me would we ? Could we ?

Live in Chile in 1979 this is outstanding and very close to the ‘record’: